‘So heartfelt.’ Dolly Parton blended stardom with a unifying care for people.

“A Few Old Memories” wasn't one of her numerous self-written songs, but the performance on a 1999 album is pure Dolly Parton. She sings of old love letters and a faded photograph – relics of a relationship supposedly put away long ago. The arrangement is spare; her voice rises above fiddle, banjo, and dobro with a sadness that feels less performed than remembered. “Just a few old love letters / with the edges all brown / and an old faded picture / I keep turned upside down."“It’s so heartfelt,” says Maureen Loughran, director and curator of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in Washington. “It’s really expressing a personal experience that can be shared across age, across location, across any kind of experience — the kind of experience that everyone can agree on.” Why We Wrote This Dolly Parton, one of America’s most iconic performers, business owners, and philanthropists, turned personal struggles and her Appalachian roots into universal anthems, with messages of hope and resilience for anyone. Dolly Rebecca Parton, who died Tuesday at 80, spent some seven decades performing that way. She took things that were intensely particular – the music of the Tennessee mountains, a childhood in poverty, a woman’s fear of losing a lover, the indignities of work, as well as her own flamboyantly constructed femininity – and made millions of strangers recognize themselves in them.From the 1973 crossover ballad "Jolene" to her "I Will Always Love You" (later recorded by Whitney Houston) to the Grammy-winning "9-to-5," a working woman's anthem, Ms. Parton’s accessible melodies and lyrics (by her own estimate, she wrote over 5,000 songs) conveyed her authentic experience with grief and struggle, but also her drive to spark hope, humor, or resilience in others. Ron Hill/USA Today Network/Reuters Dolly Parton and the Wagon Masters pick and sing for a Civic Center Music Hall audience in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Oct. 8, 1968. That may help explain an achievement harder to measure than record sales, awards, or the ability to play multiple instruments by ear. In a country increasingly divided into hostile political and cultural camps, Dolly Parton somehow came to belong to almost everybody.She was loved by good ol’ boys and drag queens, Evangelical Christians and gay men, country traditionalists and feminists. She was a daughter of poor rural Appalachia who became fabulously wealthy without seeming to repudiate her roots.“She was absolutely what you thought she was, and more,” says Lori Moore, CEO of the American Eagle Foundation, which worked with Parton on eagle conservation at Dollywood, her theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. “She was an amazingly smart business lady, and she had this incredible persona, and just anyone that got around her felt the energy that seeped out of her – she was this magnet.”She was a devout Christian who became an LGBTQ icon; an extravagantly feminine woman who fiercely guarded ownership of her songs and built a business empire around them and her other passions: childhood literacy, her Appalachian heritage, and community care. She could look almost comically artificial – the wigs, rhinestones, and exaggerated curves were part of the joke, and she was always in on it – while leaving people with the conviction that the person underneath was unusually genuine.Ms. Parton’s broad appeal was not, however, the result of avoiding convictions. She generally avoided partisan politics, but she spoke plainly about race, women, poverty, and LGBTQ people. A memorial honoring Dolly Parton is seen outside her home, Aug. 25, 2026, in Brentwood, Tennessee. “We need to pay a little more attention to being human beings,” she told PBS NewsHour in 2020, lamenting how political differences had divided families and friends. “We’re all God’s children,” she said later in the interview. “We all have a place in this world. We all need to be loved and respected.”That mattered precisely because of who Ms. Parton was. Brandi Carlile has recalled what Parton’s support for LGBTQ people meant to her growing up gay in a small town: “Getting love from Dolly is second only to God.” Yet Ms. Parton rarely seemed to cross a boundary by leaving something – or someone – behind.“She often said she would just ‘be herself’ wherever she was singing, and that would ‘have to be good enough,’” says Leigh Edwards, an English professor at Florida State University and author of “Dolly Parton, Gender, and Country Music.”That self traveled remarkably far. Ms. Parton moved from country into pop and movies, then later back toward the bluegrass and old-time music of her childhood. At 77, she made a rock album after initially wondering whether she had earned her place in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Dolly Parton, from left, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda arrive for the premiere of their film "9 To 5" in New York on Dec. 14, 1980. Ms. Edwards describes a career spent building “an immersive storytelling world out of her own life” – through songs, films, books, Dollywood, and even the Imagination Library, her literacy program for children.But songwriting remained the center of it.“What Dolly brought is this deeper-rooted knowledge and love of the music from where she came from,” says Ms. Loughran. Instead of simply reproducing that tradition, she says, Ms. Parton turned it toward the experiences of people living modern lives. Her gift was observation: seeing how the world acted upon ordinary people and putting that into songs “so that all of us can be engaged in understanding each other.”That formulation may also describe the larger Parton phenomenon. She did not resolve America’s contradictions so much as make room for them. Her version of belonging did not require people to become less particular, or one group’s dignity to depend on another’s humiliation. She remained unmistakably herself and somehow gave very different people permission to do the same.Tennessee songwriter James Rogers, who performed for years at Dollywood, remembers Parton telling him how she hoped to be remembered. Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers rehearse a song for their appearance on the TV show "Live... And in Person" in Los Angeles on Sept. 27, 1983. “She once told me that she hoped everybody would remember her for her songwriting as much as anything,” he says. “I don’t know of a better songwriter – go down the list.”As Mr. Rogers spoke by phone Tuesday from Kodak, Tennessee, a butterfly fluttered into the room and perched nearby. Butterflies were one of Parton’s personal symbols, he says.Mr. Rogers stopped. “It is a tough day,” he said.As both a country music icon and American pop cultural force, Ms. Parton was also relentlessly optimistic and rarely without a smile – and she often said as much. “If you see someone without a smile today, give ’em yours,” she once said. “All you need is a smile and a little sparkle.”“I make a point to appreciate all the little things in my life. I go out and smell the air after a good, hard rain. These small actions help remind me that there are so many great, glorious pieces of good in the world.”